As Led Zeppelin once sang, “Ramble On”…
My unfiltered, stream of consciousness take on an ‘About Me’ page
How did I get here?
After moving around a bit in my early years (from Texas to Wisconsin to Massachusetts), I spent most of my childhood & adolescent years in a small town called Norwell in the South Shore of Boston. That’s where I learned to prolifically use the adjective “wicked,” what it means — for better or worse — to be a Boston sports fan, and what a great oyster tastes like (Wellfleet or bust!). At my public high school, I was the typical overachiever. I took nearly every AP class offered (9 in total), got straight A’s, became valedictorian etc. and was actively involved in sports (cross country, basketball), music (guitar), and extracurricular clubs — all while working at the local pizza shop several nights each week.
From there I went to Princeton University, where I earned my AB degree in Molecular Biology and spent two years researching genetics & developmental biology in The Gavis Lab. Interestingly, a few years after graduating, I found out that my research earned me co-authorship in the lab’s peer-reviewed publication in G3 Journal. Also during my time at Princeton, I was active in the [very muted] greek life we had on campus (Kappa Alpha Theta) and joined the University Cottage Club my sophomore spring.
Upon graduating, I took an unexpected route. Instead of continuing on in pursuit of a PhD and (hopefully) landing a job in biotech, as I had always anticipated doing, I accepted a full-time role in institutional equity sales at a large investment bank in New York City. I know; random, right? To be fair, this didn’t come completely out of nowhere. The prior year, looking to test my commitment to the biotech path and stretch outside my comfort zone, I interviewed for Wall Street internships and was fortunate to be accepted into a sales & trading program. Though I hadn’t had the economics/finance curriculum many of my peers had, I grew up “talking stocks” at the dinner table with my dad, who had built his career as a stock broker, and I was genuinely curious to learn more about his world that was clearly so different than mine. That summer completely opened my eyes. The energy on the trading floor invigorated me in a way the lab never could. I met amazing people, and I learned so much at such a fast pace. Ultimately, going back full-time became a no-brainer. During those 4 years on the sales desk, I supported a wide range of accounts from small, long only funds in Kansas to some of the largest hedge funds in Manhattan.
After spending the minimum amount of time of ~3 years (yes, just 3 years!) studying for and passing levels I, II, and III of the CFA Program, I realized I just wasn’t ready to give up being a student yet, and quite frankly, I missed being in the weeds on all things life sciences/healthcare. So, I enrolled in a part-time graduate program at Johns Hopkins University, earning both an MBA in Healthcare Management and an MS in Biotechnology Enterprise. The program was great not just because it was part-time and allowed me to keep my finance job(s) in NYC, but more importantly because of the content/curriculum, the quality of the professors, and the types of classmates I got to surround myself with. Like me, most of my peers were full-time working professionals, but unlike me, most were working in the healthcare and life sciences industries directly. I was able to learn so much more about these domains because my classmates brought a great deal of first-hand knowledge and experience to the table.
Around my 4-year mark at Barclays, when I was starting to think about what I wanted to do next, I was fortunate to meet some founders who were just starting their own digital health-focused venture “fund” called FundRx (though it wasn’t truly a fund at the time. It now is and goes by the name MBX Capital). They saw something in me that today I still can’t put my finger on and offered me a job as a Director of Business Development. Naturally, I jumped at the opportunity. I was so eager to learn about VC and, even better, it involved healthcare! Ultimately, it ended up being a short stint as their strategy changed and my role was no longer needed. But I owe them to this day for: (1) seeing something in me in the first place, and (2) showing me how exciting a career in VC could be. I knew that wasn’t where my VC story would end.
After a few weeks of feeling bad for myself, serendipity swooped in again. A friend informed me that some very esteemed prior colleagues of mine (from Barclays) had recently left to start their own industrials-focused research firm, called Melius Research, and one of the senior analysts was looking for an associate. I clearly had never done equity research before, had zero modeling experience, and I knew absolutely nothing about machinery (which is what I would be covering). But I knew these analysts were the cream of the crop and would teach me everything I needed to be great at it. This was a new skill that I wanted to learn for some time, one that I knew would pay dividends no matter what I ended up doing later on in my career. And I loved the team and was excited about the prospect of getting in at day 1 and building something. So there was no better place to be, in my book. Over the few years I was there, we did some really incredible work and I learned more than I ever thought I could. But ultimately the VC/startup scene and my undying curiosity about the world of healthcare ultimately drew me to a different opportunity (more below). I’d be remiss to not say just how thankful I am of my time at Melius. It’s been so incredible to watch what the firm has grown into since then, and I owe everything to those guys who took a bet on me in the early days.
The opportunity that pulled me away was a role on CB Insights’ digital health research team, where I could write research on anything and everything as it related to digital health — innovations, funding trends, market developments, etc. And I had a powerhouse tool at my disposal — the CB Insights platform — to help me conduct the research and distill the insights. Funnily enough — and it sounds so obvious now, but it certainly wasn’t then — one of the first big segments of digital health that I decided to cover was telehealth. It was mid-2019 and we had no idea what was coming around the corner. But before we knew it, Covid propelled telehealth into the spotlight, making it the biggest topic in tech — at the mainstream level — for the first time ever. And we just happened to have what likely was the largest centralized database of all telehealth startups in the world. So it was an exciting time to be a telehealth analyst. But as more time went on, the more I wanted to get closer to the action. I still had VC in the back of my mind, but thought it more of a pipedream, as I was uncertain my non-traditional background would be anything a VC fund could get excited about.
But then one day, completely out of nowhere, one of my favorite digital health thought leaders, Chrissy Farr, reached out in a LinkedIn DM asking me if I was interested in VC. Turns out, she was looking for someone to join her team at OMERS Ventures. I was completely shook. We didn’t know each other, I didn’t see any reason why someone of her stature would ever even come across my name, and again, I didn’t think I had what VCs looked for. But OMERS thinks differently, and had already demonstrated as such by hiring Chrissy a year earlier, when she left a decade-long career in journalism. I spent the next couple of months “dating” OMERS Ventures, but my mind was set very quickly. If I was going to make a jump into VC, this was where I wanted to do it. Every single person I met was incredible and unique in their own way. And importantly, there was a palpable ethos of mentorship, which mattered a lot for someone like me who, in her 30’s, had already made some pretty drastic career moves (with very little on-paper experience) a few times already. The added plus was the mission: the people I’d ultimately be benefitting were OMERS’ pensioners, 600k+ municipal workers — e.g., nurses, firefighters, police officers, etc. — across the province of Ontario. I wasn’t going to uproot my entire life in NYC (and my then-fiancé/now-husband’s life) and move all the way across the country just for any job or fund. OMERS Ventures ticked all the boxes.
Fast forward 3 years, I’m still here and loving it. I’m now a Principal on the team and my coverage has expanded far beyond just health tech to all vertical software/AI. As is probably evident from my lengthy bio here, I love being a student, researching everything from as small as a DNA sequence to as big as a whole industry. I love learning new things; surrounding myself with smart, ambitious people; and helping others. There aren’t many jobs that can offer all of that every single day at a magnitude like VC does.
